Ask HN: Legal issues in enabling video support on your app using FFMPEG

If you were to make a webapp enabling video uploading and playing facility, how would you do it? I know that the standard approach is using ffmpeg to convert to FLV and then using a frontend player to play it.

However the issue that is bothering me is that many of the codecs appear to be under software patents; their binaries for ffmpeg are not available and different sites ask you to "compile and run them at your own risk considering the laws of your land".

Is it big of an issue? How do other startups overcome this problem and support vast variety of formats?